IE9 Throws Down the Hardware Acceleration Gauntlet

An anonymous reader writes "Over on Microsoft's IE blog they have an interesting comparison of browsers with regard to hardware accelerated page rendering. They write, 'One of our objectives with Internet Explorer 9 is taking full advantage of modern PC hardware to make the browser faster. We're excited about hardware acceleration because it fundamentally improves the performance of websites. The websites that you use every day become faster and more responsive, and developers can create new classes of web applications through standards based markup that were previously not possible. In this post, we take a closer look at how hardware acceleration improves the performance of the Flying Images sample on the IE9 test drive site. When you run Flying Images across different browsers you'll see that Internet Explorer 9 can handle hundreds of images at full speed while other browsers, including Internet Explorer 8, quickly come to a crawl.' Absent from the comparison is a nightly build of Firefox with Mozilla's forthcoming Direct2D acceleration enabled."

Comments

I don't want flying images in my browser

[RichMan]

What about those of us who don't want to see flying-rotating-3d-semitransparent-glowing-shaded adverts flying across our web pages.

I want fast clean loads of information. Not bloated pages full of shiny dodads designed to divert my attention from the information I am looking for.

Why bother ...

[johnlcallaway]

I've never understood this 'my browser is faster than your browser' attention. Most people use their browser over the Internet, with download speeds that make any computer wait. There is a ton of time processing 3 or 4 threads simultaneously to still draw page components. I see pages show up in a couple of seconds, it takes far more than that to read them.

So a few web sites want to use some fancy graphics. I only see their fancy graphics ... once. When I first visit. Then they are discarded every time as I concentrate on the content of the web site.

Just make the browser work...it's fast enough already.

Re:I feel sad.

[Pojut]

I don't see how anyone with a dial-up connection could do even casual browsing anymore...most websites nowadays push the 750k-1MB size, if not even bigger. (my own website linked in my sig is even guilty of this, despite my best efforts to keep things minimalistic)

Shouldn't the OS handle this?

[LWATCDR]

Really shouldn't the Operating System be using hardware rendering for graphics calls?
Yes I know that they are probably using D2D or DirectX to handle this but don't the hardware graphics calls in Windows use hardware acceleration already?
I hope that Xwindows does I know that OpenGL does but over all an application shouldn't have to care about "hardware" at all! That is why we have Operating Systems.

Re:Shouldn't the OS handle this?

[MobyDisk]

I think the problem is that most applications use older APIs that aren't compatible with a hardware-accelerated rendering pipeline. They don't double buffer, they update parts of the screen at random, and they may even use controls that plot individual pixels. Those things are nearly impossible to accelerate.

WPF applications (and GDI+?) applications get acceleration provided by the OS. I suspect that IE uses good old Windows GDI, which has some bottlenecks on Vista and Windows 7 since it has to go through an extra layer now that the OS isn't using GDI under the hood.

Re:flying images on mac

[dingen]

Wow, seriously? I just ran the demo on my iMac and couldn't get above 10 fps.

Maybe you're running Snow Leopard? I'm still on 10.5, which has no OpenCL on board. Could it be that the latest versions of Safari and Firefox use OpenCL to accelerate these sort of things already?

why flamebait

[unity100]

i would like to call the idiot who modded the above flamebait to come and fix the tag block level interpretation issue in ie8. their rendering engine is screwing up, and since it is proprietary, it cant be fixed by community. so we have to wait microsoft to get its ass up and fix their incompetence themselves in some far away point in future.

adding a proprietary directx to the mix will just increase these kind of hellholes, due to adding another dimension to watch out for. and since its proprietary, someone somewhere wont be able to produce a fix and publish it to relieve everyone.

so, the fool that modded the above flamebait, please, come and fix this rendering failure today.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft!

[jellomizer]

That is of course if Mozilla does the same thing too.
But really who cares... What people want is a fast browser. IE is now one of the older browsers out there, it has a lot of stuff that cannot be removed, a lot of backwards compatibility that other browsers just don't care about. IE is still used heavily in a lot on intranet based applications and you just can't really do a full clean house. But if IE 9 takes a lot of the overhead and has the hardware do some more of the work and things work faster it is just better for all of us... Still any web application needs to be tested to make sure it works with IE, and this will be the case for a long time. If IE runs too slow it stops us developers from putting new features and options that may take the load off the server, just because IE runs too slow. I remember back in the IE6 I had a search screen that I needed to redo because in Firefox the page loaded in 0.5 seconds (1 second on the iPhone Safari) and IE loaded it in 5 minutes... Taking way too long to process.

So if IE can render faster all the better that means I can balance the work the server and client does, more efficiently.

Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft!

[VolciMaster]

IE is still used heavily in a lot on intranet based applications and you just can't really do a full clean house.

And it's exactly those "intranet based applications" that won't see much (if any) of a boost from offloading rendering from the CPU to the GPU - when's the last time you saw a corporate desktop with anything other than an entry-level, integrated graphics chip?

Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft!

[theaveng]

let's just look for more processing power instead!

To be fair:

- Microsoft did take time to optimize Windows Vista 6.1 (win7) so it can run on as little as 256 megabytes, where it previously needed 1024. It sounds like MS is making similar optimizations for Internet Explorer so it runs better and faster.

- MS is not the only one with bloat. OS X used to run on only 128 (per system requirements) and now it requires 1 gigabyte. Ubuntu Linux used to run on my 96 MB laptop, and now the latest 2009.10 version won't boot at all. Even on my 512MB desktop it runs but sluggishly. - Point: All OSes tend towards requiring more-and-more RAM or megahertz. It's not just microsoft OSes.

Aside -

On the other hand there are OSes like KolibriOS which fit on a floppy and a mere 16 MB. Or Amiga OS at only 128MB and 400 megahertz. Of course neither of these are well supported.

Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft!

[GameboyRMH]

I wonder if it will work with OpenGL on other platforms...

Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft!

[Skye16]

Because of the complexity of pages now. If you want to stay with no-image, no-javascript, no-flash html, there are fantastic browsers out there that will support your every need. But if you want to do crazy things with your browser like: Ball Pool, then it's going to make that poor browser nom your clock cycles like a morbidly obese person at a buffet.